• IBM Storage Rides Up Flash And NVM-Express

    February 20, 2018

    IBM’s systems hardware business finished 2017 in a stronger position than it has seen in years, due in large part to the continued growth of the company’s stalwart System z mainframes and Power platform. As we at The Next Platform noted, the last three months of last year were also the first full quarter of shipments of IBM’s new System z14 mainframes, while the first nodes of the “Summit” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the “Sierra” system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began to ship.

    Not to be overlooked was the strong performance of the IBM’s storage …

    Read more

  • Hyperscaling With Consumer Flash And NVM-Express

    April 14, 2017

    There is no question that plenty of companies are shifting their storage infrastructure from giant NAS and SAN appliances to more generic file, block, and object storage running on plain vanilla X86 servers equipped with flash and disk. And similarly, companies are looking to the widespread availability of dual-ported NVM-Express drives on servers to give them screaming flash performance on those storage servers.

    But the fact remains that very few companies want to build and support their own storage servers, and moreover, there is still room for an appliance approach to these commodity components for enterprises that want to buy …

    Read more

  • All Flash No Longer Has To Compete With Disk

    December 9, 2016

    All-flash arrays are still new enough to be somewhat exotic but are – finally – becoming mainstream. As we have been saying for years, there will come a point where enterprises, which have much more complex and unpredictable workloads than hyperscalers and do not need the exabytes of capacity of cloud builders, just throw in the towel with disk drives and move to all flash and be done with it.

    To be sure, disk drives will persist for many years to come, but perhaps not for as long as many as disk drive makers and flash naysayers had expected – …

    Read more

  • Pure Storage Brings Petabyte Scale To All Flash

    March 14, 2016

    All flash storage arrays can be sprinkled around the datacenter to provide zippy block storage for database virtual server applications. And while the current crop of all flash arrays are useful and affordable for such applications, they are not scalable enough to take on some of the big file and object workloads that are dominating the storage landscape in the glass house.

    Pure Storage has set out to change this with a new line of all flash arrays, called FlashBlade, that are aimed at the petabyte-scale jobs that are at the heart of the modern platforms being built today. The …

    Read more

  • The Next Wave Of All-Flash Arrays Will Run Lean

    January 19, 2016

    If disk drives were not so inexpensive and capacious, companies would have stopped using them for persistent storage as soon as flash drives became reliable enough for an enterprise duty cycle. It will be a few years before flash arrays generate as much revenue as disk arrays in the datacenter, and it is arguable – and people are arguing about it, in fact – as to when disk capacity sold each year will drop below flash capacity. For the foreseeable future, hybrid arrays will continue to be used, and all-flash arrays will be deployed where specific workloads have particularly aggressive …

    Read more

HPE Solutions

The Next Platform Weekly

Tap the stack to painlessly subscribe for a weekly email from The Next Platform, featuring highlights, analysis, and stories from the week directly from us to your inbox with nothing in between.